


Keeping Secrets

by kittydesade



Category: Bourne Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 01:45:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade





	Keeping Secrets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shoshanna Gold (shoshannagold)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoshannagold/gifts).



" _Two can keep a secret, if one is dead._ "  
\-- Proverb

  
He was special. She knew that.

She didn't know how special until he turned that look at her and she realized she'd almost stopped breathing. That look, she didn't have words to describe that look. It was innocent and accusatory and pleading and defiant and ten other things at once. A mouth that didn't smile, he didn't scowl or frown but he just didn't smile, and blue eyes wide and paying attention. To her.

Later she decided it was the focus that did it. When his focus was on you it was impossible to ignore the weight of it, and you had to respond in some equally intense way or remove yourself from his scrutiny.

Of course, after a while that didn't matter. Jason Bourne, version two, had the same kind of scrutiny but none of the history and that took at least some of the weight off. He still didn't remember, and she wasn't going to remind him.

It was her birthday today.

Nicky Parsons fingered the ribbon, worn and wine colored with a couple small pale spots where something had stained it, before putting it away in its box. With all the other little mementos from that time. She'd put them in the box after he'd broken it off, after the field missions got serious and their relationship started to compromise their, well. Working relationship.

"Why Marie, anyway?" she asked the empty room.

Not that she begrudged him any of that. If he could be happy off in India, with her, that was probably good. It was better than coming back to work with this band of jackals, experimenting on people's minds and breaking them down into tiny pieces so they could try and rebuild them however they wanted. In whatever way they wanted. Living weapons they could send to do their bidding and get away with it, Nicky wondered sometimes why she had ever been a part of it. But someone had had to keep an eye on them, right? To argue with Conklin and the rest about how they should be dealt with and treated and helped.

He was one of the first, if not the first. The only one who survived out of the first batch, she thought. When she first met him he wouldn't do anything but stare, and only speak when spoken to. It took her, a full-time psychiatrist, and another doctor two months to get him to where he could fake being functional again. She had the feeling he had only ever managed to fake it, even in bed, after they collapsed together and talked in whispers under the blankets.

Nicky shook her head, putting the box back on the shelf and heading towards her tiny kitchen. "That's a bad idea, real bad." Thinking of then. Then was over, then was gone, with the first Jason Bourne, and she didn't need to start grieving over something she'd never really had.

There were limits to how much she could have had. She had to be professional, and he had to be away. Training or carrying out missions, one or the other, and ultimately he had chosen his job over her and she was okay with that, really. She hadn't been in love with him, or if she had it hadn't been much. Could you even not be much in love with someone?

She'd loved him more than he ever loved her, anyway. That much was clear.

But he was still tender with her anyway. Silent but tender, kisses that were soft and sweet and barely touched her lips but left her tingling anyway. Strong arms, broad chest, smooth skin. She had pressed her cheek to his chest so many times, listening to his heartbeat steady with barely a hiccup when she touched him, teasing him to attention. It made her wonder sometimes if she ever had any effect on him. More often now than then. It was easy to tell then, with the little catches in his breath that maybe she had just imagined and, ultimately, when he rolled her and put her on the bed and his mouth moved down her body and she still had to stop and close her eyes and remember to breathe.

Her arms wrapped around herself, fingers pressing against her ribs. The same qualities that made him a damn good spy also made him an attentive lover. Paying attention to every detail, every flick of his tongue or touch of his fingertips that made her shiver. Finding all her sensitive spots and touching them, not over and over but just enough that she never eased down from the cloud of sensations until he was ready to catch her.

And that was the other part that she'd never found with anyone else, although admittedly with the craziness of the last couple of years she hadn't been looking. As distant as he could be, he was also so intense that she felt connected to him at every point, from catching a glance across the room to curling up in bed with him after sex. She couldn't say that about anyone else.

Marie was a lucky woman. Had been a lucky woman.

On her birthday Jason had gotten her something small, something personal that he thought she'd like, that he'd picked up on his travels. To various places where he'd spend a couple days, kill someone, and get back to base to be debriefed and headshrunk but the thought was nice.

And it was always on her birthday, too. Her birthday and Christmas. He couldn't be there all the time but he always got her a little something, and he always made sure she got it. A velvet , gold embossed bookmark with her name on it because he knew she liked to read for pleasure. An audio disc of a French musical, recorded in Paris, because he knew she liked Paris and spoke French. A black fur hat and pair of fur-lined slippers when the cold snap and blizzard hit DC, after she complained that her apartment had way too many drafts for a new building.

Her throat swelled and she moved into the bedroom, putting the box and its contents and the memories with them away firmly where they couldn't get at her anymore. Except it wasn't the memories that got to her, it was the fact that she was the only one who knew what that CD and that bookmark and that ribbon from a big clothing box with Cyrillic print on it meant. She was the only one who remembered what his smile looked like when he was Jason Bourne and before things got bad, because, hell, no one else had seen it. She was the only one who remembered how he'd surprised her by turning up in her apartment for her birthday one night, candles and dinner still in the take-out boxes. It might as well have not happened, when she was the only one who knew it had happened at all. It might as well have been in her head.

Sometimes, she still thought about tracking him down. She knew he was still alive, they'd searched for a body and hadn't found one and the river wasn't _that_ vast. If there had been something to find, they would have found it. So he was alive, and she could find him, if anyone could.

But he didn't want to be found. Or he would have found her already. That didn't hurt as much as the amnesia. She hoped, wherever he was, that he was happy. Or that he was on his way to being happy. Somehow, finding a way to keep going and build a life for himself that wasn't spies and assassinations and government secrets. Out of all of them, he was the only one she felt wasn't quite a right fit for the program. Special, he was special.

And now gone. Hopefully, for good. Gone for good meant they hadn't found him, and Jason Bourne, the spy, could stay dead. And whoever he was now could stay alive, wherever he was. She liked the idea that he could be happy there.


End file.
